my hand, lightly rolling my thumb over the cellophane-covered cocoanut mounds.  So white, soft, and vulnerable if one were to press very hard.  I lifted the package to my face.  It smelled of cellophane. Of nothing.

But then, as I lingered, the scent of these cakes as I remembered them in childhood came to me in a way I had not experienced since those early years.  Deep and musky, otherworldly somehow.  They returned my father to me.  The young black-haired man who every day took a dinner bucket and went to work.  Went to a place called Leisenring where men entered a cage and were lowered deep underground to dig and load coal.  I saw my Dad returning, pausing in the doorway of our house.  Still wearing his black safety helmet with the lamp no longer burning, he looked down at me from behind a very blackened face. His jacket was slung over his shoulder, sodden with coal dust.  From his hardened, black hand hung the dull metal miner's bucket.

"I brought you something," he said with that slow familiar smile.  And knowing what he meant, I grasped the dinner bucket with both hands and worked off the tight lid.  Then I lifted out the water compartment - there was hardly any water left in it.  Finally, at the bottom of the lunch compartment, beneath crumpled sandwich papers, I found the unopened package of snowball cakes.  Unlike any ordinary snowball cakes, they tasted of darkness and even, mustily, of danger. 

They were a ritual between my father and me.  I wonder if he sometimes went a little hungry so that he could bring me these wonderful cakes which had been deep beneath the earth.  Greedily I would eat them up, savoring the chocolate and cream insides.  Essentially the dampness had destroyed whatever they were meant to be.  But, to me, they were magical gifts. 

And I guess they were at that.  All his life my father has given me of himself - of sweat and pain and love.  He has given me the bread of life.  But it has taken journeys deep into the earth and across the span of many years for me to understand what a wonder I have tasted.

(Janice Miller Potter was teaching English in Connecticut when she wrote this essay published in Talkin' Union magazine in the Spring of 1986. Photo: Russell Lee Photograph Collection, University of Kentucky.)